Table Talk

The image of the family gathered around the dinner table has long
held a cherished place in American culture. It conjures visions of
Norman Rockwell portraits, Thanksgivings, and Ozzie and Harriet.

Now, however, research coming out of a joint project between the
Harvard graduate school of education and Clark University's education
department is beginning to suggest that such occasions are important
for more than sentimental reasons. They help to build children's
literacy.

When parents and preschool teachers read to children and then stop
to interpret what they read, when they take children on outings where
they hear new vocabulary terms, and when they play fantasy games with
children or engage them in mealtime talk that goes beyond "please pass
the salt," they provide opportunities for children to exercise certain
kinds of oral-language skills.

These kinds of skills, which the researchers call "decontextualized"
or "non-immediate" language abilities, may spring from children's
exposure to talk that goes beyond the here and now and relies more
heavily on the words themselves to paint a picture for the listener.
Children who are skilled at such talk, for example, are good at
reporting on an event to someone who was not there, telling a story,
defining words, or using rare vocabulary words.

These researchers say there may be a link between that kind of talk
and children's literacy success later on in school--particularly when
children reach 4th grade and reading involves more than just sounding
out words.

"It's the way you need to sound to sound like a smart kid, and those
are skills that require practice," says Catherine E. Snow, a Harvard
education professor and the project's principal co-investigator. "It's
not that these skills are so hard or so inaccessible, but they have to
develop fluency with them."

Most research on children's literacy up to now has focused on how
children acquire phonetic skills--the ability to decode words--or on
emergent literacy skills, which are such pre-reading skills as the
ability to recognize that print is read from left to right. By
contrast, little attention has been paid to oral-language skills and
how they contribute to the complex interplay that is reading.

Similarly, the bulk of the growing body of research on the home and
school factors that predict school success has tended to focus on
either the home or the school--but not both.

The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, which
Snow leads with David K. Dickinson, an associate education professor at
Clark, attempts to fill in those gaps.

The study partly grew out of Snow's previous efforts to look at the
turning points, both at home and at school, in the lives of children
from poor families as they moved from 2nd to 7th grade. That study
became the subject of a book, called Unfulfilled Expectations, but it
left many unanswered questions.

"One of the things I learned was how hard it is to understand from
observations what is going on with older children," Snow says now.
"You'd sit there for six hours, and you wouldn't see anything in the
way of interaction or teaching or motivation."

Also, "if you saw the kids as 2nd graders, it was clear they all had
potential to do well in school," she says. "By 6th grade, they had
lived longer, and it was clear the forces of society had impinged on
them in negative ways."

What she needed to do, she reasoned, was start studying children at
younger ages. Thus, the current study, launched seven years ago, began
with children who were 3 years old.

Caterpillars and Conversation

Costing more than $1.2 million so far, the project has been funded
variously over the years by the Ford Foundation, the Spencer
Foundation, and by federal Head Start grants.

It began by focusing on 85 working-class, low-income families living
in eastern Massachusetts. Sixty-five of the families are still in the
project.

"We sort of know about middle-class families, and we don't know much
about how to be a successful kid from a poor family," Snow says. The
researchers believe that the kind of talk they were interested in
studying already goes on in many middle-class families.

From the time at least one of the children in each of those families
turned 3, researchers have visited them annually in their homes. There,
they interviewed the mothers and, more recently, the children as well.
They asked the mothers and children to recount a recent event, and they
observed and recorded them as they played together. The mothers read
the picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar to their children
while the researchers audiotaped the session.

"That's a book that offers lots of opportunities for the mother to
display the type of behavior that we're interested in," explains Patton
O. Tabors, the project director. "It contains labeling information like
colors, numbers, and objects, but there's also a story line and
opportunities for mothers to talk about things like metamorphosis. We
wanted to see if over the course of the three years, they would move
from labeling, et cetera, to more sophisticated behaviors."

Tape recorders also were left behind every year so the families
could record a conversation that took place while they were at the
dinner table.

"In some sense, we are showing the best of these families, but
there's still enormous variation," Snow says.

Even with the recorders running, the conversations ranged from those
that consisted entirely of requests for more milk or vegetables to rich
dialogues about sharks or the meaning of the word "oxygen."

Researchers also went into the children's preschools to observe
them. (Half of the children went to Head Start programs, and the others
attended other publicly subsidized day-care programs.) They attached
tape recorders to children's backs and captured their conversations at
play and snacktime. They recorded discussions between the teachers and
the entire class, observed teachers reading stories to children, and
recorded smaller group interactions between those students and their
teachers.

The researchers are continuing to track the children now that
they're in elementary school, following them to as many as 22 different
schools. The schools range from inner-city public schools to suburban
schools to private schools.

The home visits are also continuing. Rather than have the mothers
read The Very Hungry Caterpillar now, however, the researchers ask them
to help their children write a letter to the book's author, Eric Carle.
The mothers and children are also recorded as they play with magnets
and discuss such topics as who the child's best teacher is.

Rooms Full of Data

Now, a small number of children in the study have reached the 5th
grade. Others, because they joined the study later or were held back in
school or both, are in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades.

The data collected on these families fill rooms at both Clark and
Harvard. And researchers are beginning to sift through it all and to
draw some conclusions.

In one of the analyses they have done so far, they looked at the
frequency with which families and preschools used rare vocabulary
words. Their finding: Children who, at age 4, were in settings in which
rare words were used more often had bigger vocabularies by the time
they reached kindergarten. They also scored higher on a task that
required them to give definitions of simple words--skills which, other
studies have suggested, translate to better literacy skills later on in
elementary school.

The researchers also found that the amount of narrative talk that
went on during mealtime was linked to children's abilities in
kindergarten and 1st grade to understand stories and to learn new
words. And explanatory talk at the dinner table also tended to enhance
their vocabularies.

During book-reading sessions--both at home and in preschool--the
proportion of "non-immediate" talk that went on bore a direct relation
to children's pre-reading skills a year later.

Children who engaged in a lot of pretend play with their playmates
in preschool were also good at giving definitions, understanding
stories, and even mastering print-related skills by the time they
reached kindergarten.

The researchers also found that some situations gave themselves over
to promoting these kinds of oral-language skills more easily than
others. One of those occasions was mealtime.

"It makes a very strong case for why eating together is critical,"
Tabors says, even as fewer families at all levels of society are
finding time to do that.

"I think people are uneasy in their hearts about not sitting
together, but they're not quite sure why," she says. "After all,
everybody gets fed."

But dinnertime offers opportunities for children to hear new
vocabulary words, to negotiate their turn to speak, and to recount the
events of the day for family members who were not there.

And the same is true for mealtimes in preschool, says Dickinson, who
heads the school-based portion of the study. In fact, those kinds of
school opportunities were found to enhance children's vocabulary
skills, even after the researchers controlled for home-based factors
that usually have a strong bearing on children's school success, such
as the mothers' level of schooling.

"A lot of teachers don't see that sitting and talking with children
at mealtime is part of the curriculum," he says. "They're walking
around the room or talking with other adults."

The problem, however, is that the kind of talk the researchers are
interested in occurs infrequently in preschool--it accounted for 10
percent or less of the time during which children were engaged in
talking while they were in school, according to Dickinson.

The rest of the time, he says, teachers are giving directions or
asking students to name colors, recite the alphabet, or tell a personal
preference.

The bottom line, in any setting, these researchers say, is that
children benefit from lots of adult talk.

"I think the message that you should read to your children has
gotten through to parents," Tabors says. "What we're saying is that
it's the quality of those interactions." Does a mother or teacher stop
to ask children what they think will happen next in the story? Do they
relate things in the story to other events in children's lives? Do they
interpret what is going on? Those are the situations that expose
children to the kind of "non-immediate" talk that may be key to school
success.

Conquering 4th-Grade Slump

But the findings the researchers have come across so far are only
"moderate to strong." They come from a battery of tests and activities
developed by the project for that purpose and that were administered to
children in the study in the spring of their kindergarten and 1st-grade
years.

The investigators suspect the real payoffs for lots of early
exposure to non-immediate talk will come when the children in the study
reach what Jeanne Chall, another reading researcher, has termed the
"4th-grade slump." That's when reading becomes less of a decoding task
and more of a comprehension task that requires children to learn from
what they read, to write for audiences who have not already read the
same text or shared the same experiences, and to understand the subtle
rules of different voices and genres.

That's when the vocabulary words heard long ago could help to fill
in students' background knowledge or the explanatory talk might provide
a sort of mental model for the book reports a child has to write.

Of the small number of children in the study who have reached that
stage in their schooling, a few look as though they fit the
researchers' hypothesis. One child with lots of early exposure to
non-immediate talk has been formally identified as gifted and talented;
another has been called very bright by teachers.

"It's a hypothesis that is increasingly getting confirmed by the
findings," Snow says.

But the researchers also have yet to tease out all the other factors
that may have contributed along the way to children's success.

"We're missing something more in the affective--the degree to which
kids are made to feel competent and capable of learning," Snow says.
The researchers plan to tackle those kinds of questions if they receive
funds to continue the project as the children go into middle school and
junior high school.

Tabors also talks about examining the complex power relationships
between mother and child and the role they play in developing
children's literacy. And Petra Nicholson, another researcher in the
project, has been looking at how parents' and teachers' expectations
for children and parents' sense that they are their children's first
teachers contribute to children's later success in school.

What the researchers have now is a motherlode of data that has
provided fodder for more than 50 published studies. In addition,
scholars from around the world have come to Massachusetts to mine the
data for cross-cultural comparative studies.

A key question that remains unanswered is which of the two
environments being studied--the home or the school--exerts the stronger
influence on children's literacy.

"If we consider the preschool setting compensatory," Tabors says,
"what is it compensating for? Is it reasonable to expect a setting a
child attends a couple hours a day to be one where a difference can be
made?"

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